Yes to Cuomo, no to Nixon: The Daily News picks Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary for governor

In the Democratic primary, two-term incumbent Gov. Cuomo is being challenged from the far left by a newcomer to state politics.

Cuomo has more than earned a ticket to the general election. His eight years have notched major accomplishments that would be the envy of many of his predecessors.

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As governor, he has held spending down, bending a generation-long, bipartisan trendline of ever-growing state government. Thanks to a local tax cap, suburban families choked by property tax bills can begin to breathe again.

He led the push to legalize gay marriage, a national landmark that’s expanded a core right to thousands.

After the Sandy Hook massacre, he pressed passage of one of the country’s most stringent gun laws.

He has fought, successfully, to substantially raise the state’s minimum wage.

He has been a strong if not consistent voice for public school reform.

He has opened up public universities to many more families.

He is working, with mixed success, to repair a criminal justice system in desperate need of rebalancing, including by raising the age for prosecution and aiming to legalize marijuana responsibly.

And is rebuilding awful old airports and bridges.

Meantime, Cuomo struggles to improve a strained subway system that, though nowhere close to the dark days of the 1970s, has been down on his watch with increasing frequency. Cuts made in the wake of the financial crisis, compounded by years of disinvestment he continued in his early years, caught up.

New Yorkers are right to point fingers at him, because the state-dominated MTA runs the trains.

Cuomo gets credit for — belatedly — putting new people in charge at the authority, demanding a turnaround plan and championing congestion pricing, charging cars to come into Manhattan’s central business district. It’s the single smartest sustainable source of public transit funding.

But the opening of a few Second Ave. Subway stations doesn’t change the main story: the subway is still lousy and riders are right to be mad at Cuomo. He’s been there for eight years.

His failings underground are not his only flaws.

His public authorities have thrown good economic development money after bad, especially upstate. He’s made a bad bet on casinos.

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His ego interferes with his effectiveness. He puts New York City’s mayor, and sometimes the city itself, through the wringer, seemingly for sport.

Most important, despite the ethical house burning all around him — corruption convictions of the state’s top legislative leaders, and of two top administration officials — Cuomo has never used all his powers of political persuasion to fix a broken system.

Even as his campaign continues to take large sums from people and entities with business before the state, he too easily reduces ethics problems to flaws in the character of the perpetrator, giving short shrift to obvious appearances of corruption. In a meeting with this Editorial Board, he slid 12 ounces of Poland Spring halfway across the table and said, “If you can be bought, you can be bought for that bottle of water or $100,000.” That’s plainly preposterous.

But Cuomo is in his bones a pragmatist, and an effective one at that.

Pragmatism is not a word in challenger Cynthia Nixon’s vocabulary. While very smart, Nixon is disqualified by proposals so doctrinaire and simplistic, spending demands so profligate, that they feel cooked up in the first meeting of a college Democratic socialists club.

She would loosen the property tax cap that has been one of Cuomo’s most effective instruments for imposing some semblance of fiscal restraint on the state.

She would sharply ramp up spending on public education, already highest in the nation, by upwards of $7 billion a year.

She champions a single-payer health plan that the nonpartisan RAND Corporation says would increase spending by $139 billion in 2022 and $210 billion in 2031 — necessitating a 156% increase in taxes. How to pay for it? She’d punt on that conversation until after a bill is passed.

She wants a right to housing and “universal rent control,” two dreamy notions she struggles to define. She says the latter would apply to all buildings in New York, even brand-new construction. That would hobble housing production for a growing city.

Her call to reform the state’s Taylor Law would give public employees permission to strike. As even Mayor de Blasio has acknowledged, that would be a catastrophe for the unions and the public they serve.

Insult to injury: In her interview with the Daily News Editorial Board, Nixon had no clue what rate the state currently charges millionaires (8.82%), or what percentage of overall state income tax these 0.6% of taxpayers currently shoulder (about 40%).

Those facts matter, mightily, since all her plans are premised on ramping up taxes on that exact sliver of the population, and when miscalculation that drives away the few taxpayers who support the lion’s share of the state’s budget would have disastrous effects.

Cuomo says he wants another term to see through his projects like fixing the subway and, finally, enacting the long hoped-for and promised ethical cleansing of the dirty Capitol.

Once more, with feeling. The Daily News endorses Andrew Cuomo in next Thursday’s primary.